Beck Holden discusses adaptations of The Winter’s Tale.
“Renounce every principle of tast and decency…or else agree that the dramas of Shakespeare are monstrous.”
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard’s condemnation sums up the eighteenth century response to Shakespeare, and the French critic likely would have found the A.R.T.’s Shakespeare Exploded! festival abhorrent. French intellectuals had strict ideas about what made a good play: the action should take place in a single location in a single day; a comedy should be a comedy, a tragedy a tragedy; kings and clowns shouldn’t share the same stage; violence has no place onstage; and, above all, the play’s action must never strain reason. Given these criteria, is it any wonder that Shakespeare, with his fool advising King Lear, his orgy of violence concluding Hamlet, and his plays spanning kingdoms, continents, and decades, might strike Suard as savage?
Perhaps none of Shakespeare’s plays would have seemed more savage than his late romance The Winter’s Tale, the inspiration for two Shakespeare Exploded! festival productions. King Leontes starts the play as a loving husband, then turns into a jealous tyrant far too quickly for critics to find it plausible. Three acts of tragedy in Sicilia melt away to pastoral comedy in Bohemia. Sixteen years pass with only thirty-two lines of explanation. And in the finale, a statue of Leontes’s dead wife Hermione comes to life – that doesn’t even rub shoulders with reality.
The Winter’s Tale enjoyed a fair success when it was written, then it vanished between 1642 and 1741. The play began to recover popularity in the 1750s, thanks to adaptations focusing on Florizel and Perdita’s love story. In addition to appealing to the public’s passion for pastoral romance, this shift eased the critics’ problems by starting after the sixteen-year gap. The Sheep-Shearing (1755) eliminates Leontes and Hermione altogether, paring the five-act play to twenty pages. The great British actor David Garrick stitched together another version in 1756, the three-act Florizel and Perdita. This adaptation also begins sixteen years later, when a shipwreck brings the repentant Leontes to Bohemia.
In the nineteenth century, performance practices gradually reclaimed Shakespeare’s original text en route to more opulent productions. Cutting Shakespeare’s text remained common, but actual rewriting tapered off. The Winter’s Tale thrived in this tradition because it offered so many opportunities for spectacle. Charles Kean’s 1856 production began with a royal banquet, reproducing Ancient Syracuse as accurately as possible with musicians, slaves, and dancing girls. The production also featured a procession bearing Hermione to her trial on a litter and a sheep-shearing festival with 300 dancing shepherds and shepherdesses.
In 1881 theater manager William Poel struck back against pictorial productions by staging Shakespeare’s plays on an empty stage in Elizabethan garb, trying to discover the secrets of how they were played in Shakespeare’s day. As part of his experiment, he also restored the entire text. The Winter’s Tale holds an honored place in Poel’s movement thanks to Harley Granville-Barker’s groundbreaking 1912 production. Barker set the play on a blank white stage with four towering Greco-Roman columns – enough to hint at a location, while nudging the viewer to fill in the blanks.
More recently, the wheels of time are spinning back to the 1700s, and The Winter’s Tale is inspiring a flood of adventurous new adaptations. Today, however, the adaptors aren’t fixing Shakespeare’s failures – rather, they are reveling in a mythic world where Time itself is a character, tragedy blends into comedy, and statues come to life. The boldest adaptation may be Philippe Boesman’s opera Wintermärchen (1999). For Boesman, Apollo’s oracle was an offstage quintet and Perdita a silent dancer. Most stunning, however, was Boesman’s statue scene, in which Hermione was revealed frozen in a block of ice. Over the course of the scene the ice was slowly chipped away until Hermione finally rejoined Leontes, completing his journey from rage, through repentance, to reconciliation.
Best of Both Worlds creators Randy Weiner, Diedre Murray and Diane Paulus have found in The Winter’s Tale a story of love, loss and repentance so timeless it begs for contemporary music to set it free. Drawing on funk, soul, gospel, and blues, the production follows an R&B king whose jealous rage threatens to destroy his family and friendships. Only a true gospel miracle has the power to inspire forgiveness and lead the repentant king towards redemption.
Beck Holden is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ MXAT School Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University
